This work explores Costa Rica's tourism narratives. I analyze what these narratives reveal and what they obscure about the country, its people and its history. By reading the tourism promotional materials of the Costa Rican Tourism Board, I argue that official discourses sustain racialized spaces in the country by reproducing the mythology of a white settler society. I ask what the consequences of these official narratives are for tourists and for Costa Ricans. I argue that government supported tourism in Costa Rica depends simultaneously on the hypervisibility and invisibility of racialized and gendered bodies. I also seek to disrupt official tourism narratives by contrasting them to sex work within racialized and transnational structures of power and desire. This contrast allows me to argue that the unofficial and largely invisible story of sex tourism in Costa Rica indirectly upholds the tourism industry and the nation's white mythology.